John D. Clark - Life and Career

Life and Career

Clark was born in Fairbanks, Alaska. He attended the University of Alaska, and then received a B.S. at the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena, California in the 1920s, where he was the college roommate of L. Sprague de Camp. He received an M.S. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and, in 1934, a PhD from Stanford University. He moved to upstate New York in the early 1930s, and was living in Philadelphia in 1943. On June 7, 1943, he married operatic soprano Mildred Baldwin. In 1962 he married Inga Pratt, widow of Fletcher Pratt, and he dedicated his book Ignition! to her.

In 1933 Clark published a novel spiral chart of the periodic system of the chemical elements. This design was used by Life Magazine for a striking and influential illustration as part of a special number on the elements, 16 May 1949. It inspired the artist Edgar Longman, whose mural was a prominent exhibit in the Festival of Britain science exhibition, London, 1951. Clark came up with a new version in 1950, but this has not had the same success.

Clark was working as a research chemist for John Wyeth & Brother of Philadelphia in 1943. From 1949, until his retirement in 1970, Clark developed liquid propellants at the Naval Air Rocket Test Station at Dover, New Jersey (after 1960, this became the Liquid Rocket Propulsion Laboratory of Picatinny Arsenal). His title there was chief chemist. He was the author of Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants (1972), which chronicles the development of liquid rocket technology in the United States through both technical explanations of the work scientists performed and also anecdotes about the people involved and the often humorous incidents which took place. Now out of print, copies of this rare book sell for over $400.

In his later years Clark lived in the Green Pond section of Rockaway Township, Morris County, New Jersey. He died after a long illness at St. Clare's Hospital in Denville, New Jersey on July 6, 1988. His papers, consisting of four cubic feet of correspondence, drafts of scientific and science fiction publications, notes, an unpublished typescript memoir, diaries (1923–1984), clippings, and photos, are preserved in the Special Collections at Virginia Tech as part of that repository's Archives of American Aerospace Exploration.